Cairo – the ancient and modern city. One side of the river are the modern buildings of today, and on the outskirts of town is the Giza plateau with the familiar pyramids and the sphinx. The city itself is a

As far as women were concerned, Claude Debussy was a bastard! “There was a woman at each crossroad of Debussy’s life,” Marcel Dietschy writes. “Certainly women of all ages seemed fascinated by him, and they attached themselves to him like

When we speak of musicians, we often credit their parent or a likely aunt as their first influence at their instrument. For the Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924), we find his father, clarinettist Fernando Busoni (1834-1909), important to his development

The extraordinary dynasty of dance music composers and musicians named Strauss originated in the Hungarian town of Buda. Around 1750, Grandfather Johann moved to Vienna, and his son Franz Borgias operated a small tavern in the suburb of Leopoldstadt. That

Claude Debussy’s friend Paul Dukas candidly wrote “the strongest influence to which Debussy submitted was that of the littérateurs, not that of the musician.” And while most of us have no problems describing Debussy as an “Impressionist,” a term originating

When we think of an ‘idyll’ we think of a peaceful and happy time. In music this doesn’t all have to be set in the happy land of major, we need that darker minor side to set the major into

The Scottish operatic soprano Mary Garden, who sung the part of “Mélisande” in the original production of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902, was to later write about the composer, “I honestly don’t know if Debussy ever loved anybody really.

Here is what Robert Schumann had to say about Carl Czerny’s Fantasies Brillantes on Original Themes Op. 434, “A greater bankruptcy of imagination than that demonstrated in Mr. Czerny’s newest creation could hardly exist. One should force the esteemed composer